1916’s The Chicago Anthology: A Collection of Verse from the Work of Chicago Poets,
edited by Charles G. Blanden and Minna Mathison, was one of the first attempts
to define and present the poetry of Chicago as a distinctive, unified body of
literature. Indeed, plenty of writers have gone on to be defined by their
relationship to the city: Carl Sandburg, Karl Shapiro, George Dillon, Edgar Lee
Masters, and Gwendolyn Brooks, to name just a few. And this anthology takes up
the literary torch with some of America’s brightest poetic lights who’ve been
touched by Chicago’s many inspirations. But by no means is the poetic
conversation about Chicago over. It’s a vital, important part of the literary
landscape of America, and it’s clear that new members are appearing daily. More
than a few contributors remarked in their cover letters that the literature of
Chicago is experiencing a renaissance. After seeing so many fine new writers
and quality veterans, I’m inclined to agree.

The
poems in this anthology are not just beautiful objects to be enjoyed once and
then put away. Savor the ones that seem written specifically for you. Consider
the rest a challenge to be met. I guarantee at least three poems in this book
will unlock a memory (real or imagined) of State Street vendor brats, the cacophony
of smells that is the Taste of Chicago, or the sight of children skating at
dusk at Daley Plaza – even if you’ve never been to the Windy City itself yet.

Chicago
is my hometown. No matter your background or interests, these poems do a fine
job of making it yours too.

City of the Big
Shoulders
also provides an interesting counterpoint to the more author-specific anthology
The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Century, eds. William Allegrezza and Raymond Bianchi (Chicago Il:
Cracked Slab Books, 2007) [see my review of such here]. I admit, I’m more
interested in the sake of a geographic anthology to gain a sense of what kinds
of writing and writer activity is happening within that arbitrary boundary,
rather than an exploration of the personality of that geographic space. Still, I’m
fascinated by the exploration of the myth of Chicago, one I’m very little aware
of, but for the story of the city as central rail point, or inventor of the Second
City comedy troupe, or namesake of that easy-listening shameful 1980s-era pop band.
Who are you, really, Chicago?

There
are remarkably few names in this collection I’m previously aware of – but for
Rachel Loden, Tony Trigilio and Don Share – meaning that the bulk of writers
from the city working in an entirely different vein, including the more
language-centred and more experimental poets are somehow absent from this
collection. Contributors to the anthology include Barbra Nightingale, ElisePaschen, Janet Wondra, Vivian Shipley, Maya Quintero, Ellen Wehle, Susan Elbe
and some two or three dozen others, each providing their own perspective on the
windy city.

At the
Crawford Coal-Fired Power Plant

As she inhales the scent of boiled eggs, the
woman thinks of childhood, the farm she grew up on, the chicken coop down the
hill from the clothesline. She thinks how back then, coal dust could coat
sheets in a matter of minutes. Not anymore. These days it’s what she can’t see
that worries her. But the plant manager says that this is a forward-thinking
plant. Why? Because Crawford has reduced
its mercury emissions ahead of schedule. And its nitrogen oxide emissions are
down 30%. She doesn’t ask him what schedule. She doesn’t ask how much
mercury or nitrogen oxide a person should breathe. Nor does she ask why the
plant has been in the news in the past few years for spewing deadly toxins into
the Chicago air and increasing the risk and incidence rate of asthma. She’s a
guest here, so she smiles and nods when he hands her a hardhat, goggles, and
orange earplugs. The building hums and throbs around them. She can barely make
out his words as he shouts and points. She sees the pulverizer where the coal
is crushed and blown into a furnace. She sees the boiler, the precipitator, and
the fireball that glows like a small sun. In one room fly ash lands on her
black sweater. She tries to brush it off, but it sticks to the cashmere. She asks
if she should wear a facemask. She asks if the ash is dangerous. No, no, he says. These days we collect the ash from the precipitator and gather it into
bins. Then we sell it for cement. But it’s in the air, she tries to tell
him, pointing to the ash she sees rising like dust. She’s not sure he hears
her. She’s not sure he sees what she means. He keeps opening and closing his
mouth, as if to reassure her, as if to explain that everything is fine. She has
nothing to worry about here. (Nin Andrews)

Perhaps
this might be a matter of the style itself in which those more experimental
poets work, given that subject was the centre of the collection (or perhaps
these writers simply didn’t submit to the original submission call), a call more
easily suited to a narrative, metaphor-driven lyric style. This also means that
the work within the collection are predominantly, if not entirely exclusively,
from the previous decade. It would have been interesting to have seen an
anthology that worked archivally, to actually dig through the past half-century
or so of Chicago (and further) writing, to see how the city has been already
depicted, instead of the fraction of the anthology that appears to have been
composed for the call itself. How has the city already been discussed, and by whom? What kind of portrait of the
city has already been painted?

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different?I'm not sure how it will change my life: it comes out in late September.

What I’ve tried for in recent work is clarity, lack of predictability, and also certain kinds of risk.

There’s an inclination I have – it’s like in that musical exercise when students are asked to ‘finish’ a melody or rhythm that the instructor starts – when I write, the words fall into line to meet a kind of aural expectation. Part of what I’ve wanted is to let that impulse be open to disruption. Phil Hall said to me that in jazz it’s called dirt – intended elements of dissonance. Probably what it takes first of all is a closer listening to the world.

The other kind of risk I’ve been interested in has to do with the speaker: risking the dignity or composure of the speaker.2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?I think it's the effect that poetry has on me as a reader.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?My first drafts do not much resemble the final poems. I write them in sketchbooks on large, unlined paper – I like the possibilities of writing between and around the initial text. Then I revise on the computer. And I work slowly.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning?Poems usually start with phrases for me – a few words that seem to have a force-field to them. Some overheard or read, others arising internally.

Leaving Howe Island wasn’t a book from the beginning – it’s an accumulation of poems from the last half-decade. But the first section of the book is a series united by subject – I’d written three or four poems and felt I could dwell on that material longer. At this stage I see internal resonances to the manuscript that I wasn't really aware of while working. I guess that’s inevitable when the writing is compiled.

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys readings?I do enjoy readings. They don’t factor into the writing process for me.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are?Theoretical concerns are present for me, but I wouldn't say that they dominate over other concerns. I don't think of my poems as answers to questions.

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be?I can’t conjure a single idea of ‘the writer’ that feels accurate – there’s such diversity under that term, and there should be.

Or it makes me think of a figure like Harry Mulisch, the late and brilliant Dutch writer who would say amazing things like: “At a fairly early age, fifteen or sixteen, I knew for certain that I was a great genius. Only I didn’t yet know in what.” He was conscious of creating a writerly persona – he even argued there was a cultural need for remythologization, after the holocaust and war.

As much as I like to listen to his interviews, I guess what I’m getting at is that being ‘the writer’ strikes me as a performance. Some people are really good at that. But it should be optional. The work should be enough. 8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?It's essential to me. I have the good luck of close editing relationships with a few writer friends.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?It's tough to give advice a ranking, when the relevance depends so much on circumstance. Currently on the wall at my desk – it's not advice, but I feel it’s worth holding on to: Whatever is misanthropic is false (the French philosopher Alaine, in a letter to Simone Weil).

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin?I schedule writing hours into my weeks – ideally daily – but the specifics shift all the time.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?Sometimes it’s enough to pause and let some less striving part of the mind work it out. I tend to fill the gaps with domestic chores.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home?Cumin frying in garlic and ginger.

There was one poem, a pantoum, that wasn’t working for a very long time. Then I saw the Jack Chambers exhibition at the AGO (http://www.ago.net/jack-chambers-light-spirit-time-place-and-life). Some of his paintings are of his family at home, and he was incredible at converying—and heightening—the sense of natural light in the room; I found that merger of light and domesticity very moving. I revised the poem with the spirit of those works in mind. Which I guess is also an alternate answer to question 11.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?Visit Cracow, and Istanbul, and Newfoundland.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer?I probably would have been a doctor: I studied medicine before changing my mind.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else?Writing gives me a particular kind of experience that nothing else does: I don’t love it in the sense that it’s predictably enjoyable, but I do love it.

Saturday, September 28, 2013

After years of complaining, I finally have a photo of my
great-grandparents, Finley John McLennan (December 1, 1857 – January 12, 1938)
and Julia McRae McLennan (June 1, 1862 – July 9, 1932) and their children,
taken approximately (according to the back) 1910 (given my grandfather's birthdate and the fact that he looks about seven or so here, my father points out, this is more likely a photo from a couple of years later than that; he also tells me a neighbour has a family image from the same photo studio in Maxville, around the same time). Standing, from left to right,
are their children Scott (January 17, 1902 – June 20, 1983), Belle (May 24,
1895 – August 7, 1978), Roddie (May 7, 1889 – October 24, 1955), Christina (December
24, 1892 – March 11, 1923) and Donald (August 1, 1898 – August 17, 1955), along
with my grandfather, John Duncan (July 13, 1907 – November 2, 1969) in the
front. My cousin Susan (eldest granddaughter of Donald) was good enough to scan
and send both sides of the image, from her mother’s collection [see Donald and Jesse’s 1930 wedding photo with Jesse’s 2011 obituary here]. Finley John and
Julia had seven children: Roderick, Katherine Finlayson, Christy Ann, Margaret
Belle, Donald John, Alexander Scott and John Duncan, as well as an unknown
daughter that died in infancy.

I’d only ever seen the photo in my father’s copy of Maxville: Its Centennial Story, 1891-1991(1991),
a photo presented along with information on our family by one of my father’s older
cousins (my father appears to be the youngest of that particular generation). Unfortunately,
some of the information this cousin presented was not only twenty-five years
out of date, but incorrect (my birth year is wrong, for example). It made me
not trust the information on us that had been provided, and triggered my
interest in properly pursuing genealogical work. After a decade or more of
attempting to get a copy of the photo from this particular cousin, I simply
gave up.

Finley John and Julia lived next door to where our
homestead currently stands, inheriting his uncle Roderick McLennan’s (d. 1873) farm
when he died, inherited under the stipulation that Roderick’s widowed mother,
Christina McLennan (born in Scotland, she died October 4, 1912 at 81 years), as
well as his sister Mary (d. January 29, 1887, at 64 years) would be cared for. The
McLennan family Bible, still in my father’s house, was actually a wedding
present to Finley John and Julia, who married on February 23, 1888. The house
that currently stands on their former property is actually the third (at least)
to stand, as the house Roderick would have lived in sat slightly back from the
current (you can still see the remains of the foundation), and at least one further
(for Christina and Mary) sitting closer to the front of the property. It was
actually Roderick McLennan who originally purchased the two hundred acre lot 3,
concession 7, Roxborough, from the crown April 10, 1845 (where my father, as
well as my sister and I, grew up), only to purchase the one hundred acres next
to it, lot 4, concession 7 in 1860 from James McDonnell, the original owner (after
Rory’s death, Margaret married Angus MacDonald of Sandringham). Given that he was
still listed in the census in 1851 in Lancaster, I’ve long suspected that
Roderick never actually lived on the original property, but moved out in 1860
to land that was, instead, already cleared.

The farm next door to where my father currently lives was in
our family from 1860 until my great uncle Scott finally sold the property (selling
parts and parcels off over a stretch of years) in 1955, when he and his wife
Janie retired to Ottawa. Since my grandfather was the youngest, he moved across
the road from his own homestead after he married (while still working the home
farm with his elder brother, Scott), in a log house where my father was born,
and where my grandmother not only widowed, but my sister now lives with her
husband and three children. At the corner of my sister’s property, apple trees
the only evidence of where a one-room schoolhouse once sat, where my
great-grandfather and his siblings, as well as some of his children, would have
schooled, abandoned around the time my grandfather was born. When my father was
less than a year old, he and his parents moved to where my father has remained
since.

Toronto ON: Out of a workshop
conducted by Victor Coleman comes the collaborative journal COUGH, the first two issues of which are
now available, most likely by contacting one of the editors or Victor Coleman
himself. Loosely based on Vancouver’s TADS
magazine (as was our own journal, The Peter F. Yacht Club), the journal is edited by a different member of their
group each issue, with the first issue, February 2013, edited by Oliver Cusimano, and the second, May 2013, edited by David Peter Clark (a third issue
is apparently due out any minute now). Since the Queen Street Quarterly folded, there really hasn’t been much
opportunity to see the work of more experimental writers in/around Toronto in
journal form, especially from emerging writers (chapbook presses such as Ferno House and The Emergency Response Unit, as well as the Avant-Garden Reading Series, at least, have been picking up some of that slack), so the appearance
of such a journal is much-required.

Worn atomics. Buss shelter logistics. To get to
the front. Iterate the passage as it’s narrated. Rerun. The return binds
industry, numbers quantity. Pre-packaged, pre-read. This is nothing. No one is
called next. Lines repeat unnoticed. A stance again, another. Equally isolated
blindnesses bind viewer recognition. This is a theory of high art. (Andrew
McEwen, “All We Ever Wanted Was Everything”)

Cambridge UK:CRITICAL DOCUMENTS
editor/publisher Justin Katko was kind enough to recently send a small mound of
publications he’s produced over the past few years, including Rosa Van
Hensbergen’s SOME NEW GROWTH AT THE
TEMPLE OR LOBE (2013), his own Songs
for One Occasion (2012), Mahmoud Elbarasi’s ST. BEAUMONT CONSERVATIVE CLUB: TEN POEMS (2012), Posie Rider’s CITY BREAK WEEKEND SONGS (2011), Frances
Kruk’s A Discourse on Vegetation &
Motion (2008) and Tom Raworth’s LET
BABY FALL (2008), among others. It’s nearly too much to go through at once.

At
this point, Tom Raworth is an old master, publishing dozens of books and chapbooks
over the past five decades, and has created a space for himself between
language poetry and political commentary that is entirely his own. A former
Calgary writer now living in England, I’ve been catching small publications by
Frances Kruk for years now, wondering why more of her work hasn’t been
available in Canada, or why she hasn’t (at least, that I’ve seen) produced a
trade collection? Her small sequence A
Discourse on Vegetation & Motion is all anxiety and rage, and it is marvelous.

today I have ₤12,000 worth of Rage

squashed into a MindsetI
vacuum

Ladybirdsre-live Nausea,

insert Electrodes into Aspic & watch

the Meat dance

in its sustainable Environment

The
short sequence that makes up Rosa Van Hensbergen’sSOME NEW GROWTH AT THE TEMPLE OR LOBE is quite compelling, each
page/stanza pushing against its own conclusion, rushing ever forward from page
to page. The poem feels sectioned and contained at first, but begins to pick up
speed, each stanza/page beginning to bleed into the succeeding page until the
entire sequence is irrevocably linked. As she writes: